Sermon Prepared for Messiah Lutheran Church

The Affirmation of Marriage Vows – 2/16/01

by Gregory S. Kaurin

Associate Pastor for Spiritual Care and Development

 

Text: Ecclesiastes 9:7-9 & Matthew 19:4-6

 

The Sermon:

What’s Inside?

 

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Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to celebrate the survival of these couples in their marriages.  But, beloved, we are also here to grow deeper in love, to go beneath the surface of the routines, quirks, distractions and arguments, beneath the surface of laughter and romantic moments of marriage—to go deeper and talk about: what’s inside.  What’s really inside?

There is a country song about a young man who is about to have a special night with his true love.  He goes to a amateur winemaker and asks for something add the right touch.  The older man says he has just the thing and takes him down into the cellar.  There, he reaches through the cobwebs and hands the young man a dusty bottle saying, “There might be a little dust on the bottle.  Don’t let it fool you about what’s inside.  This is one of those things that gets sweeter with time!”

 

There might be dust on the bottle.  Don’t let it fool you about what’s inside.  Marriages are dusty.  We are dusty people. 

But like bottles, we also have a smooth elegance and shape.  We are beautifully made.  And when the right person is looking at us, even the dust doesn’t hide that we are each someone who is valuable, loveable.

 

This morning, I sat at my dining table and watched our neighbors through our door windows.  (I’m sure there’s a law against that.)  Together, Mom, Dad and their eight-year-old son, were building a snowman.  It was melting about as fast as they made it.  As they were rolling the snow, it picked up dirt, twigs and mud.  It was lop-sided with a misshaped face and topped with a green plastic flowerpot for a hat.  The snowman was plain ugly.

Afterwards, the family went inside and a little later I saw Dad drive off.  About then the little boy came back outside.  He stopped and just stood there a while looking at his snowman.  I couldn’t see his face, so I don’t know what he was thinking or feeling. 

After a moment, he picked up a ball of snow and began rubbing the snowman with it, the base, middle and face.  Finally, he patted what was left of the ball into place on the side of the snowman’s head.  It wasn’t to add or really change anything.  Actually, it only made the snowman look worse: now it had a hideous bump on the side of its head.  But I could tell the boy had done it as an excuse to caress, love and hold what he and his family had made, had done, together.

That lop-sided, muddy, bumpy, ugly snowman was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.  For that moment, and every time I glanced at the ugly snowman, I got a taste of what was inside.  Miraculous, untouchable, unknowable: Love.  Even if that boy, mom and dad didn’t know it, they had an encounter with the Divine, with God, Love himself.

 

At weddings and services like this one tonight, I usually talk for some time about the “un-holiness” of marriage.  Two years ago I defined it, “The un-holiness of marriage: the morning-breath, bad-hair, where’s-the-remote, why-do-you-always, who’re-you-looking-at, close-your-mouth, your-dentures-are-slipping part of marriage.”  And it’s true that what we do with the un-holiness of marriage, how we react to it, will define and protect the sacredness, the holiness, of marriage.

 

But tonight, I want to go further and deeper into the holiness of marriage.  I am partly reacting to a wedding that Pauline and I went to some time ago.  At the wedding the couple had done something that sounded like a good idea.  They decided not to have the pastor give a sermon.  (That wasn’t the good idea.  Well…maybe it was; I’ve never heard that fellow preach.)  Instead, they picked three couples that they respected and asked each couple to speak about what marriage has meant to them.

Fortunately, the couples didn’t get all flowery and sugarcoated about it.  Unfortunately, each decided to give the wholly realistic and brutally honest truth about how hard a good marriage is, with all its struggles.  They’d each finish by saying how wonderful and worth it marriage is.  By that time, however, they’d fairly convinced us that marriage must be one of the levels of hell.  At least it builds character!

 

Instead, tonight indulge me to wax a little romantic.  Under the reality of the dust, and even deeper under the surface, the definable and speakable beauty, there is something even more powerful, unknowable and eternal.  There is something that we can get a taste of in our marriage and family.  The trick is to look for it, recognize it, cherish it and remember it whenever possible.

 

Earlier this week, Ken Bradford and I were talking about a number of things.  Eventually, he described his most cherished gift that his wife has ever given him.  He said, “You know, Greg, we all have those days when you’re feeling grumpy about things.”  (It’s hard for me—and any of you who know him—to imagine Kenny in a grumpy mood.)  “We all get grumpy or down,” he said, “about our life, even marriage, family and other things.  But I have this gift that she’s given me sitting out on the bathroom shelf.  So, I might be in there grumbling, and then I see this, and pick it up.  I remember what it means, and everything changes.”

It’s this little box, never unwrapped.  There might actually be something in it—but Ken has never had to open it to receive the real and deeper gift that it is.  There is a card on the outside with a poem that reads something to this effect: “When you are down and hurting, here is this gift.  To receive what’s inside, you do not need to open it.  Keep it wrapped, but pick it up and hold it to your heart.  Know that you have all of my love.”

What is that deeper gift?  In a word: Love.  But it goes beyond all the kinds of love we can define.  Beyond the Greek words of eros, romantic love, beyond philia, love of friendship.  Agape is an unconditional love, but this is a love that includes and is the best of all three.  Many people experience it, but never know its true source.

 

St. Paul was evangelizing a group of people and he told them, “But it’s not like I’m bringing God to you.  God has been here all along.  You’ve been looking at his works, and even experiencing his power and love.  You just didn’t realize it: it was God.”

The same is true when the pure love of spouse, family or child hits us.  If we haven’t numbed ourselves to it, we sense that we are experiencing something bigger that we alone can hold, express, or understand.  It is the love of God. 

 

And that is what makes us priests to each other.  I can’t say the number of times that I’ve been warned that a pastor cannot be pastor to his/her spouse.  On one real and very important level, that is true.  (It is, isn’t it, Pauline?)  But on another level, a level that includes all of you, it is not true.  We, in our families and close relations, we are priests and pastors to each other.

It begins at a wedding.  In pre-marital counseling, I make a point with each couple that in the ceremony the center will be that exchange of vows.  At that moment and for the rest of their lives the primary ministers of their wedding and marriage is not and will never be the pastor.  From then on, the pastor is just the legal witness for the state. 

The primary ministers at a wedding and in marriage and family are the bride and groom, the wife and husband.  The rest of us are witnesses to a legal, yes, but a most holy exchange, when two people exchange promises and the love of God …with each other.

From that moment on, a meal served to each other, champagne glasses clinked together, and moments shared under the stars or in bed together: these are sacramental, like Holy Communion.  They are sacraments that call the promises, once made, into the present.

 

That is what’s inside: a sacred promise that rises from earth and joins us to heaven.  From.  This.  Day.  Onward.  It is the love of God.  Inside us.  Through us.  Drink deeply.

 

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